Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday April 21, 2012 @01:40AM
from the big-dark-blue-room dept.

jamaicaplain writes "The annual Lyrid meteor shower will hit its peak this weekend and promises to put on an eye-catching display. NASA scientists plan to track the Lyrid meteor shower using a network of all-sky cameras on Earth, as well as from a student-launched balloon in California. Meanwhile, an astronaut on the International Space Station will attempt to photograph the meteors from space."

Earth meteors tend to burn up at a very high altitude (75 to 100 km) where the air pressure is about 11 micro bars at 80 km and scale height of 7km. Since 11 ubars is much lower pressure than the atmosphere at Mar's surface which is about 6 mbar (6000 mbar), the meteors should still burn up but at a lower altitude on Mars than Earth.

Lyrid meteor skywatchers with good weather should venture outside in the late-night hours Saturday or early Sunday, preferably after midnight to catch the sky show around its peak, which occurs at 1:30 a.m. EDT (0530 GMT). You should allow up to 40 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the darkness.

The comet produces a band of debris. The Earth's orbit crosses the band of debris. Pretending that the band of debris is fixed, we get an Earth that is crossing through the band very, very slowly, while rotating. So, no matter where you are on Earth, your section of sky crosses through the densest part of the debris at 0100-0300. That is why they never include location, or if they do, it is location followed by GMT.